Observations (& Inspirations)

Click the image to enlarge. It is an excerpt from the 1966 Ed Ruscha book of photographs, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, a continuous folded print of exactly what the title says it is, over 296 inches long when unfolded (seen here in a slideshow).

Starting in 1963, with the publication of Twentysix Gasoline Stations, Ruscha began a series of photographic art books that documented ordinary aspects of life in Los Angeles. For Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Ruscha mounted a motorized Nikon to the back of a pick-up truck and photographed every building he passed. The resulting book, with the pictures printed in order and labeled with their street numbers, achieved an effective non-judgemental and almost anthropological record of previously unexplored details and aspects of the urban experience. Ruscha exercised control over each step of the bookmaking process and with the use of inexpensive offset printing, standard paper, and simple, paperback bindings, he created a new genre of art book designed for commercial distributors rather than art galleries. Ruscha’s books, which became a staple of Conceptualism, were extremely influential to younger generations of artists.

… “The Sunset Strip satisfied one of Ruscha’s early ambitions: ‘In Oklahoma City, I delivered newspapers riding along on my bicycle with my dog. I dreamed about making a model of all the houses on that route, a tiny but detailed model that I could study like an architect standing over a table and plotting a city.’ As a result of his subsequent fascination with the Sunset Strip, this unrealized youthful idea resurfaced in a different form. Ruscha reportedly photographed the Sunset Strip with a motorized camera in a pickup truck in the time that it took to drive the two miles and back, but the piecing together of the photographs and the folding and gluing of the printed sheets by hand took more than nine months. Moreover, this was not a one-time photo shoot, for in 1979 Ruscha said that he had photographed all of the Sunset Strip in each of the previous five years. ‘I begin early on a Sunday morning when no one is around. I use a 250 Nikon, change the film real fast, and just go along and document [it].’ Indeed, the artist has continued to document the street to the present.”

Photographing an entire street from a pickup truck, using a motorized camera, also anticipates Google Street View, by forty-one years! Life imitates art imitates life. And Ruscha continues to re-photograph the Sunset Strip, as noted in an interview with the artist Richard Prince for the article, “Ed Ruscha: the original master of California cool has never been hotter,” in Interview magazine, July, 2005:

Richard Prince: “I hear you’re doing Every Building on the Sunset Strip again [published by Steidl as Then & Now]. What’s there right now?”

Ed Ruscha: “I photograph it every year or so. Anytime I get up to the Strip I’m confronted by two things: How many buildings still do exist, and how much things have changed. But they will soon be doing plenty of Rambo-Vegas-style projects that will span Sunset Boulevard with skywalk bridges and mirrored escalator malls that will be cruel to the eyes. It’s cancerous and ultimately fatal. I wish time would stand still.”

The art critic Dave Hickey writes in a January, 1997 ArtForum article about Ruscha’s earlier book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, and the process of “reading” the book as analogous to reading a map or going on a journey, “speaking to us in some odd language of analogue and incarnation.” Hickey continues,

In that moment, I became an art critic – or, more precisely, an art dealer, since I bought all five books. Because it wasn’t just personal. Ruscha’s book nailed something that, for my generation, needed to be nailed: the Pop-Minimalist vision of the Road. Jack Kerouac had nailed the ecstatic, beatnik Road. Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady were, at that moment, nailing the acid-hippie Road, and now Ruscha had nailed the road through realms of absence – that exquisite, iterative progress through the domain of names and places, through vacant landscapes of windblown, ephemeral language.